In What's New in Perl 5.6.0?, Simon Cozens tops the list
with UTF-8 support, a feature that should make processing and generating XML in Perl simpler.
Cozens reports that:
"By default, Perl now thinks in terms of Unicode characters instead of simple bytes; a character can, as the
CJK people already know extremely well, span several bytes. All the relevant built-in functions (length, reverse, and so on) now
work on a character-by-character basis instead of byte-by-byte, and strings are represented internally in
Unicode."
Clark Cooper, maintainer of XML::Parser, told xmlhack that "5.6 will now make it at least practical to work with
UTF-8 strings *as* UTF-8 strings" rather than treating the results of XML::Parser as ASCII or remapping them.
The improved support should also make it easier to create UTF-8 output, though ordinary (non-XML::Parser) input of UTF-8
information will still require a translation.